Closing in on the end of the school year presents teachers with the opportunity to build memorable activities that help students pull everything together. Here are some fun, creative ideas that could be used in a variety of content areas and grade levels.​

​Let's face it. This time of year, we are awash in testing, end of school year to-do lists, and that constant nagging feeling that there is never enough time. While this is usually a time to opt out of something new, we encourage you to lean into some new practices, strike up conversations about education news, and keep searching for new ideas. To help out, we've picked out a few things we want to you check out.

So, take 5 minutes, look through some of the resources that have helped our ideas bubble up lately, keep counting down the days until summer, and make sure you are living and teaching each and every one of those days to its fullest.​

Book talking is hard. And sometimes impractical. As a librarian, I like to connect as many students as possible with interesting books and I find that often, book talking 5 books to a class only reaches 5 students; it's wholly impossible to book talk 30 books to a class of students, let alone to 5 sections of 30 students throughout the day. So, I am constantly looking for other ways to connect kids with books.

If you are a self-proclaimed history nerd like me, you know that artifacts have amazing powers. Even as a child, I would hold a historical object (my great grandmother's depression glass or my grandfather's Bronze Star) and instantly feel connected to the past. It was magical. I think of this as another one of my senses: my "history sense."

We all show up every day for our students. Is there a particular student or group of students who have made you a better teacher, caused you to change your practices, or shaped you into the educator you are today?